How to Develop Team Members into Great Leaders

These are my top five “move-the-needle” areas:

1. Get good at goal setting and at communicating your goals on a regular basis to your team. You probably know very well what the firm or practice needs to do to be successful. You likely have spent time talking about where you want to be by the end of 2024, and maybe every quarter in between. But have you been clear about “what success looks like” in more than just quantitative terms? Have you clearly communicated to your team where you are headed and where you want to end up? Often managers spend a lot of time focusing on this, but they forget that the rest of the team hasn’t been as engaged, don’t know what they know, and aren’t as connected to where everyone needs to head and how they all fit into the picture. Develop a communication cadence around sharing goals, keeping your team updated about where you stand on reaching them, and help everyone understand where they fit in the efforts to achieve the goals.

2. Fit the right person into the right role. Continue to check in to ensure you are doing this correctly. This is very important and often gets lost because managers choose “the best person” or they “need to fill the role” or they want the team to just figure out how to work together. Let’s say you hired someone for a client-service position and they are doing really well. Then an important operations manager role opens. You want this person to move into that role, but they have no management experience, don’t particularly like the operations piece and will miss working with clients. You are not doing them, your firm or yourself a favor. This happens all the time, especially in firms where people need to move to get to the next level. Take stock of what your people are good at, where they have strengths and where their areas of weakness might be. I often teach the best managers to pull the strengths out, not to fix the weaknesses. Don’t move someone just because you think they are a good employee. This leads to frustration and upset for both the manager and the team member. Make sure you move them to somewhere that fits who they are. Revisit this a couple of times throughout the year – right people in right roles at right times. Make that your management mantra.

3. Set objectives, let the team know where to head and make sure people know what they need to do to get there. But don’t leave them alone and let them run with it. You don’t want to micro-manage, but your team members need to know what they are doing well and where they need to make mid-course corrections and improve. I work with people who have been professionals for 20-30 or more years. I am not “teaching” them anything new, but I can coach them on where to focus, or how to refine something they could do better. Even your long-term team members, your senior members and your “star” players can benefit from your support. Think about professional ball players; the quarterback who is having his best year still takes input and feedback from the coach.

4. Teaming doesn’t just happen. You might have hired the best people for each of the roles you need on the team, and they may get along just fine. But people can be amazing individuals but not great team players. There are many, many scenarios I’ve seen in my work with advisory teams and firms where each person is a solid “A” player but together they have not gelled as a cohesive team. I often talk about this as seamless to the client, but also seamless behind the scenes. This means your client experience might be great, but team members are experiencing a lot of overlap in duties, they are not clear who is supposed to do what and when and there are constant fire-drills to get things done. I have one of my graduate classes read a book by Jim Clifton and Jim Harter (the people who run the Gallup surveys) called It’s the Manager.I It is packed with stunning research that shows the manager has about 70% to do with whether a team is going to be effective or not. 70%! That’s a big number! You have to manage the team, give them direction, and guidance and help them move through the stages of teaming according to Tuckman: Forming, storming, norming and performing (and even adjourning). Most teams don’t even know the stages exist. Learn about teams and then help your teams by stepping in as a leader and manager and giving guidance.

5. Continue to learn – enjoy being educated and seeking new knowledge. As a manager or a leader you want to set an example. The greatest thing about this profession is how much change there ishow many different types of people are drawn to the business and most of all how much there is to learn. This is not a profession where you can rest knowing you have learned it all; it changes constantly. You may think because you have made it to a leadership or management role, you have acquired all the knowledge you need. But the best managers and leaders are those who focus on continual learning and improvement. Be committed to getting that extra edge, to sharing something new and interesting with your team, to being the “go-to” because you know a lot about what’s happening across the industry. Your first best step is reading my articles and others in this publication, of course, but keep it going. If something is interesting, investigate and learn more.

Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry, in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022 and 2023. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).

She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.

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